The present invention generally relates to the running of computer applications, and more particularly, to running a plurality of instances of an application.
Cloud computing is a burgeoning network service mode. An analysis report by the International Data Corporation (IDC) points out that among the $359 billion global information technology (IT) expenditure in 2009, $17 billion came from investment in cloud computing. Other surveys also indicate that two thirds of enterprises plan to expand the use of public clouds.
“Multi-tenancy” architecture is an architecture used in cloud computing. Multi-tenancy borrows and develops many concepts from host computing, introduces the concepts into the ecosystem of x86 platform servers, and extends the original concepts to support thousands of “tenants” within and external to enterprises. Such “tenants” may be any application in any enterprises (either within enterprises or external to enterprises), which has its own security requirements and dedicated virtual computing environment. The environment may include several or all levels of the enterprise IT architecture, from storage to user interface. Interactive applications may be multi-user or “multi-tenant” oriented in nature.
“Multi-tenancy,” in brief, is that a single software instance may serve a plurality of organizations (or users). A software program supporting multi-tenancy operates, in design, to enable every organization using the software to use a separate virtual instance, and to be able to customize the virtual instance. The advantage of multi-tenancy lies in reducing overall resource consumption, as well as the cost of running an application through sharing a software instance by a plurality of organizations. In addition, since all the organizations share the same set of core code, the update and development of the software is easier. Furthermore, by using the multi-tenancy architecture, physical resources and software resources may be reduced, management may be simplified, and efficiency may be improved.